"Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual." This is David Bowie, back in 1973, a couple of decades before he was writing 8,000-word articles about Balthus and Julian Schnabel for Modern Painters. But the one-time ad agency employee, seasoned veteran of underachieving bands such as the Konrads, Riot Squad and folk trio Feathers, and voracious acquirer and skimmer of books (he once described himself as "a born librarian with a sex drive") understood early on that one of the best ways to generate mystique was to deny that it existed. "It was just the songs and the trousers," he later claimed. "That's what sold Ziggy."

Who knows why any pop act becomes successful? Talent is helpful, but lack of it is by no means a dealbreaker. A willingness to work hard and to listen to advice from a judiciously curated network of friends and associates is handy. Shrewd marketing never hurts. Equally important are good timing, dumb luck, strange alchemies. After all, who would have guessed that Bowie, voted 20th most popular male singer in Record Mirror's 1972 Annual Readers' Poll (beneath Val Doonican), would within 18 months become such a lodestar – musical, sartorial, attitudinal – that, according to Peter Doggett in his 2011 study The Man Who Sold the World, he represented "the most reliable guide to the fever of the seventies"?

Some Bowieologists turn to his upbringing and early biography for clues. Much has been written about how the recurrent themes of paranoia, crackedness and alienation in his lyrics may stem both from the knowledge that aunts of his had received electric shock treatment or been lobotomised, and from his relationship with stepbrother Terry, his gateway as a teenager to jazz, Beat poetry and outsider Americana, who later started suffering visual hallucinations and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Others, perhaps taking their cue from Bowie's assertion that "Ziggy is a conglomerate, a conglomerate rock star", treat his breakthrough album as pick'n'mix postmodernism, bricolage art that exults in the non-anxiety of influence: his name a nod to Iggy Pop (whose 1977 LPs The Idiot and Lust for Life he co-wrote and produced) and late-60s US singer the Legendary Stardust Cowboy; plumed androgyny and glam theatricality in sync with that of his pal Marc Bolan and of Alice Cooper; stylised bovver-boy chic – to offset the fantastically orientalist costumes of Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto – courtesy of the droogs in Stanley Kubrick's film version of A Clockwork Orange; octave jump in the chorus of "Starman" a knowing echo of Judy Garland's "Over the Rainbow".

After reading Simon Goddard's Ziggyology, both those forms of creative genealogy seem hopelessly conservative. Beginning with a quote from Arthur C Clarke about the billions of stars in the Milky Way, he continues with pint-sized mini-biographies of Bowie's true antecedents: cosmologist Fred Hoyle, who argued that "the universe is in a state of continuous creation"; Greek mathematician Pythagoras, "who played a one-string guitar called a 'Cosmic Monocord'" and spoke about the music of the spheres; 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who produced a proto-science fiction treatise called The Dream; HG Wells, like Bowie born in Bromley, whose 1895 novel The Wonderful Visit tells a "Ziggyish fable of the man who fell to Earth, an angel shot down in a country village by a vicar".

A great deal of research has gone into Ziggyology, but, unlike Goddard's previous book Mozipedia: The Encylopaedia of Morrissey and the Smiths, it's not presented in exhaustive, quasi-academic fashion. Here Ziggy becomes a forcefield of fabulation, an imaginative cartography through and to whom all manner of ley lines pass. To think Ziggily is to adopt the most expansive outlooks possible to questions of chronology and cultural influence.

The obvious influence is Greil Marcus, whose 1989 Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century used what he called "spectral connections" to link dadaism, lettrism and even 16th-century Dutch heretic John of Leyden to the development of punk. Marcus even discussed Nigel Kneale's pioneering science-fiction drama Quatermass and the Pit, which Goddard, imagining the young Bowie's television diet in the 1950s, also cites – specifically, Professor Quatermass's closing message to British people: "We are the Martians!"

On occasions, Goddard might have been even more speculative. Ziggy, even more than Hawkwind, can be seen as a high point of what might be called Anglo-futurism, but across the Atlantic nearly two decades earlier black American jazz pianist Herman Blount had started "calling himself 'Sun Ra', telling everyone he came from Saturn and wearing far-out spacey Egyptian pharaoh costumes". This would have been a perfect moment to postulate about Bowie's relationship to race – in a post-Rivers of Blood era what kind of whiteness did Ziggy embody? But the comparison isn't pursued. Nor is the irony that Bowie, known to be afraid of flying, was more seaman than starman.

It is a shame that Goddard feels obliged to talk up the impact Ziggy made by contrasting it with what he believes was the homogeneous, beige world of 1970s Britain. Did it really feel like that to people at the time? And from today's perspective, when celebrations of Bowie's transgressions are almost an industry, and when the art-school tradition within British pop music is so lionised (Bowie didn't go to art school, but his love of mime, "queerness" and conceptual personae make him a key part of that lineage), it's the music that used to be seen as embarrassing chart- pap that now feels truly alien and weird. Was anything on Top of the Pops ever as disturbing as Lieutenant Pigeon performing "Mouldy Old Dough"?

Still, Ziggy was more remote and appealingly other than subsequent Bowie-saluting shapeshifters such as Madonna, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, all of whom – because of social media? – are dismayingly effusive about and connected to their fanbases. Otherness: that's what Ziggy incarnated, and what Goddard's book so ingeniously and entertainingly renders.